


Supervision Advised

by PresquePommes



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M, Possible Inhuman Character, scientists - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-16
Updated: 2013-09-16
Packaged: 2017-12-26 14:20:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/966938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PresquePommes/pseuds/PresquePommes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was one of those projects that few people voluntarily chose to be a part of; those who didn't find it creepy just found the rumours ridiculous and the town undeserving of serious scientific attention.</p><p>Generally speaking, you had to have <em>done</em> something to have ended up on the Night Vale research team.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Supervision Advised

It was rare for him to seriously misbehave.

The report they’d written on him made that quite clear: The assessed is reported to be punctual, reliable, and thorough, was found to be adequately self-managing, and continues to demonstrate innovative problem-solving abilities and remarkable composure in high-stress environments; as such, the assessed may be considered suitable for both cooperative and independent research. When placed in an untasked team of peers, the assessed has consistently been seen to assume a leadership position and demonstrates an aptitude for task assignment according to peer strengths and specializations, creating what has been referred to by superiors as a “highly communicative and efficient” work environment. Time management skills are satisfactory, but could bear improvement.

It should have been a strong commendation. Most scientists had their eccentricities, and it was understood that their peers worked around them if they were problematic and overlooked them if they were not. It was unusual for any single idiosyncrasy to be so compromising that it would affect a person’s placement more than their qualifications.

For such a thing to be the case, it was generally understood that the person in question had to have  _done_  something worthy of remark.

Due to the events of January, 2012, concerning the accidental destruction of company property and subsequent hospitalization of Mr. Henry Coulter [see attached], the assessed is to be assumed to possess an established predilection for impulsive and unintentionally dangerous behaviour. As of yet, the assessed has failed to adequately demonstrate understanding and remorse, and therefore must be considered at risk for future offense; special supervision advised.

 Carlos didn’t buy the line about his failure “to adequately demonstrate understanding and remorse.”

He knew what he’d done wrong, and he’d acknowledged it. He’d fucked up. It had been a careless error, plain and simple.

He’d fucked up, and his friend had gotten hurt over it. It was just supposed to be a prank, the same kind the two of them had been trading for months without any issue.

Once his burns were cleaned up and he’d had something to numb the pain, Henry had thought the whole thing had been hysterical, and Carlos wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

He didn’t understand what the problem was.

[supervision advised]

Geoffrey Dunkirk was exactly the sort of person everyone had expected to voluntarily join the Night Vale research team.

If Carlos was being polite about it, Geoff was excitable.

If he wasn’t, Geoff was the kind of brilliant lunatic whose insane theories started meandering into uncomfortably suggestive territory when he spoke about them for any length of time.

Geoff’s love of weird science far exceeded his love of his wife, and Carlos knew for a fact that he wasn’t the only member of the team who found it strangely uncomfortable when Geoff touched his equipment.

Doctor Maria Catalina Mata Salazar was not the sort of person anyone had expected to voluntarily join the Night Vale research team, but within two days of arrival, it had become mortifyingly obvious that she was there not only as a scientist- and a brilliant one, at that- but as a supervisor.

Out of the five scientists on the team, three were there involuntarily, and Catalina was burdened with the responsibility of keeping the first, Sophia Crown, focused on her work- Sophia had been embroiled in a relationship with her last supervisor’s wife, Carlos discovered, and hadn’t actually done anything wrong in the academic sense- the second, Jean-Frédéric Leduc, away from casinos- J.F. had been two hands away from winning the pot when the experiment was scheduled to start, he told Carlos, it wasn’t as though he could be expected to fold when he was so _close_ \- and the third, Carlos himself, out of trouble.

Catalina wasn’t especially enthused with her assignment, but she took it seriously, nonetheless.

Carlos liked Catalina- she reminded him a little of an elementary school teacher he’d once had- but he didn’t find her watchful eyes particularly welcome- she reminded him _more_ than a little of an elementary school teacher he’d once had- because he certainly didn’t need keeping out of trouble.

He was an adult.

He was an adult, and as much as he liked Sophia and J.F. and was made uncomfortable by Geoff, none of them made particularly thrilling prospective partners in mischief.

Without someone to prank or play pranks with, he couldn’t really get up to all that much trouble.

[supervision advised]

When they’d all arrived- they’d all exited Route 800 at the same time, but J.F. had appeared a sheepish fifteen minutes late for reasons that Catalina seemed to find particularly unamusing- and started moving their equipment out of the trailer and into the laboratory- this turned out to be a hastily repurposed medical clinic which was functional but suspiciously stained- and their meager personal belongings out of their cars and into the apartments above the lab- the existence of which was such a relief that none of them bothered to question the unusually high presence of forgotten belongings they found pushed into the corners of closets and stuffed behind doors, things no one ever came to collect, things that must have been owned by people everyone claimed had never existed- Geoff had left his car radio on.

At first, Carlos hadn’t really been listening.

When a local- a man, thirtyish, balding, who stared too much and blinked too little- had asked him what he was doing, he’d only stopped for long enough to say, “I’m a scientist.”

He’d been focusing first on moving his equipment, and then on evading Geoff’s disconcertingly covetous offers to help him move the seismometer, which really wasn’t all that heavy, just sort of awkward. The radio had just been a pleasant murmur in the background. Carlos remembered thinking, off-hand, that the host had an oddly soothing voice.

It was when he’d started to move his own possessions upstairs that he’d noticed.

Everyone had paused, and was listening.

_He says he is a scientist. Well, we have all been scientists at one point or another in our lives. But why now? Why here?_

“Did you talk to anybody?” Sophia had asked him, and he’d told her that he had.

She’d just sort of looked at him helplessly, like she wasn’t sure what to say.

“Um, the guy on the radio likes your haircut.”

“Oh,” he’d said.

“You do have pretty great hair, Carlos,” J.F. had told him, and everyone had agreed, with the possible exception of Catalina, who just told them they could talk about Carlos’ hair after they’d finished moving in. They hadn’t.

Instead, he’d gone to City Hall to call a town meeting, only to discover that the town had already met.

After he’d introduced himself and the team, he’d searched the crowd for the man who’d asked him what he was doing. As it turned out, he wasn’t the man on the radio, even though the man on the radio had liked his hair. It was a curiosity.

Once the town had dispersed, he had decided that the man on the radio hadn’t been there, and then, that his not being there made sense. He was currently broadcasting, after all.

But then he’d walked back to his new, still-foreign apartment, and he had listened to a radio that belonged to someone who would never come to take it back from him and may have never existed-

_Carlos told us that we are, by far, the most scientifically interesting community in the US, and he has come to study just what is going around here._

-and he’d concluded that the man on the radio _had_ been there, had to have been there, because pre-recorded segments were a reality he hadn’t considered, and the man had spoken as though he’d been there.

_He grinned, and everything about him was perfect, and I fell in love instantly._

At least, he’d certainly made it sound like he had been there.

He hadn’t seen anybody who looked like they fit the part in the crowd.

And there was no accounting for creative license, he supposed.

[supervision advised]

Cecil wasn’t what he’d been expecting.

He wasn’t really sure what, exactly, he had been expecting, but Cecil certainly wasn’t it.

Well, he hadn’t really been expecting Cecil at all, but if he had been, he would’ve been expecting someone taller, to start with.

He would later discover that Cecil tended to identify himself as _neither tall nor short_ and he’d laugh about it, because Cecil’s height lay somewhere along the shorter end of that flexible range of possible heights.

When he had first gone to the radio station- partly out of curiosity, partly for legitimate scientific purposes- it had been with some serious difficulty that he’d reconciled Cecil’s voice with his appearance.

It wasn’t just the height.

It was everything else, too.

Cecil was a compact person- neither fat nor thin, that much was true- with thick dark hair and dark, expressive eyes and an almost comical abundance of freckles that rendered his ridiculous fashion choices oddly childlike and made it even harder to guess his age- which, when Carlos had asked, he had supplied at an airy “oh, somewhere between twenty-five and fifty, or maybe sixty, you know how it is,” even though Carlos had no idea how or even what _it_ , specifically, was.

(When Carlos had asked about her later, Cecil had claimed that his mother was originally from Nhàkinh Xiao Nghỉ, a country in Southeast Asia that didn’t exist and which Carlos had all but decided was probably Vietnam but could have been somewhere in Taiwan or the southern part of mainland China if he ignored all common sense and just started guessing wildly, which often seemed to be the best course of action in Night Vale.

When Carlos asked about his father, Cecil had just stared and Carlos had refrained from speculation altogether, settling simply on probably not Vietnamese, Taiwanese, or Chinese.)

Once he had overcome the dissonance that was the combination of Cecil’s oddly sweet and highly animated mouth- peppered with freckles as well, and while the scientist in him was indignant over the unnecessary accumulation of sun damage Cecil’s lips had taken, Carlos also found them distinctive and peculiarly charming- and the rich and incredibly resonant voice that rolled out of it, he’d had a second realization.

Cecil was an easy mark.

Cecil was _such_ an easy mark.

Initially, he had seemed to have a sharpness to him- a sort of secretive, very shrewd variety of feigned ignorance- but the more he spoke, the more Carlos had come to suspect that he really _was_ just astoundingly naïve.

They’d both benefited from the alarming readings Carlos had gotten when he’d tested Cecil’s microphone- the whistling and chirping of his instruments had hastened his departure before he’d had the chance to decide if he wanted to scratch that particular itch quite badly enough.

Carlos was a man of science, first and foremost. If he was being honest, the reason he found Geoff so unpalatable was due, at least in part, to a concern that others perceived his devotion to science as something even remotely similar to Geoff’s.

(Logically speaking, he understood that this was not, and could not be true, as he had never sighed lovingly over a petri dish, nor made comments about unicellular reproduction in an uncomfortably sensual tone.)

Carlos was a man of _applied_ science, second.

People did not often seek out science, and so, he sometimes felt the urge to bring it to them.

In an active, noticeable and absolutely memorable way.

He had always liked to excite people about the practical applications of knowledge, particularly those who lacked knowledge themselves.

(Carlos’ definition of excitement was strictly scientific, however, and therefore did not necessarily demand the traditional, positive connotation that others mistakenly associated with the term.)

Like Cecil.

Cecil was endearingly vacant when it came to scientific matters, and that much had become clear almost immediately.

Cecil seemed like the kind of person who would benefit from a little hands-on learning.

[supervision advised]

When he walked back into the lab, Catalina glanced at him, glanced away, and then glanced back.

The glance extended into a- rather exasperated looking, actually- stare.

“ _Ay,_ _Dios santo_ ,” she sighed.

He raised his hands defensively. “I didn’t even do anything.”

“I have two children, and they may be grown now, but I know that look,” she scolded. “ _No me mandes fruta_ , Carlos. If you haven’t done anything, then you just haven’t done anything _yet._ ”

She raised her eyebrows meaningfully, lips pursed, and he understood what it meant: she was _supervising_ him.

He kept his hands raised, confused and a little annoyed.

He hadn’t even _planned_ to do anything.

Yet.

There was no way she could have known that he had vague intentions of doing something when even he didn’t know what that something was or if he’d go through with it.

Preventative maintenance was a flawed system, Carlos thought.

“A scientist shouldn’t anticipate only one result from a study without any proper controls,” he’d mutter into his microscope later, when she’d already gone upstairs, “it biases their results.”


End file.
